Editor’s note: This commentary is by Dexter Mahaffey of Hinesburg. He is head of school at Vermont Commons School in South Burlington.
[F]ive Junes ago, I was sitting in a parent education session at a Suzuki violin summer institute. My child’s longtime teacher — who also happened to direct the Suzuki program for the university — explained to the audience recent findings in brain research indicating that no activity on record fired as many synapses in the brain as playing the violin. Seeming to be both a congratulatory remark on our good choices as parents as well as an unabashed plug for the value of sticking with his program for years to come, we felt somewhat smug and got back to the chaos that was (and is) the more realistic business of being parents.
This June I was enjoying a family dinner out on a lovely evening that had just cooled off, and as we relaxed into the meal and the conversation with our waiter took on that more casual tone not atypical to such evenings, we discovered he had just graduated from college. An avid saxophonist, he was waiting tables while looking for work as a musician and music instructor, but he’d also finished a neuroscience degree. We got talking education, and he enthusiastically espoused all the new studies and data indicating how powerful an experience for the brain playing musical instruments is, for the young as well as those of us just a little past our youth.
With so much new information arriving each month about the brain and its workings — more and at a faster rate than ever before in my career in education — these new findings are both thrilling and challenging, as we try to envision and enact the best imaginable schools for our students.
The five years between these two Junes have seen a remarkable growth in scientific output around the workings of the human brain during activity, thanks to fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) research that has unpacked what adolescents in particular go through as their brains grow, develop and begin to coordinate functions in an organized fashion. To that end, this summer the faculty and administration at Vermont Commons School read Laurence Steinberg’s “Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence,” a brilliant and eminently readable summary of what scientists and researchers currently know about the adolescent brain. It’s an eye-opening text, one I encourage any parent or teacher of a pre- or current teen to read. Much of what we learn confirms old intuitions as educators — we could observe trends occurring, but we didn’t necessarily know why or what was causing them; but many incredibly important revelations challenge or flat-out contradict our old assumptions, forcing us to reconsider altogether how we think about working with young people.
This is not to say that you need to drop everything and seek out a violin (or saxophone) instructor. There are also strong arguments about sports and self-esteem with girls in particular, or positive trends for athlete’s GPAs when in season. But it is a new frontier, our knowledge of the adolescent brain, and the findings are significant. Sometimes that’s because we know the precise mechanism of what’s going on, such as what Steinberg and others refer to as the plasticity of the brain between ages 10 and 25 (the new bookends to adolescence), which has to do with its changeability, its ability to be transformed through nurture (or distress!) beyond its nature. And sometimes the brain research is more sociological, such as where new studies reveal trends in performance or behavior caused by the brain, but for as of yet unknown reasons or causes.
One trend was covered by Liana Heitin in Education Week in early August. PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment), the highly regarded international benchmarking program for looking at student learning, examined adolescent technology use. PISA researches trends using massive quantities of data from student performance on assessments, and this study revealed that students who regularly play online video games score above average in reading, math and science, while students who regularly use online social media score below average in the same areas. While one could perhaps have predicted that video games tax students in the same way that assessments of reading, math or science do — rewarding speedy success at puzzles and challenges — what was surprising is the negative association with regular social media use. You’ve perhaps read the articles explaining the correlation between regular use of Facebook and depression, but the revelation that students who use social media actually see a downtick in their performance in key school subjects is nothing short of shocking.
With so much new information arriving each month about the brain and its workings — more and at a faster rate than ever before in my career in education — these new findings are both thrilling and challenging, as we try to envision and enact the best imaginable schools for our students. Counter to what you might think, I take great comfort as an educator and as a parent in reading “Age of Opportunity” because, as the book title states, knowing how the adolescent brain works gives us a fantastic and invigorating chance to do our work better, more pointedly, and above all more compassionately. It’s like driving down an unfamiliar highway at night when suddenly a navigation system appears out of nowhere on the dash of your car. It’s discovering a rough and somewhat incomplete treasure map of your child’s — or student’s — path to learning, growing, discerning, becoming.
